In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter,
for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Kahlil Gibran
Tag: friendship
Kindness
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 mail letters and to purchase bread
only kindness that raises its head
from the world to say
it is I you have been looking for
and goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Words from Under the Words
Encouragement
I have always liked the person of Barnabas in the New Testament. He was known as the “Son of Encouragement”. I have always felt that I would love to be known like that, as one who encourages. We all need encouragement and know what it feels like when someone believes in us. Someone who sees us, not as we are, but as we have the potential to become. That gives us courage.
…… If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified…then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis. If I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potential.
Carl Rogers
A full, but short, life.
At the start of August I wrote about the kitten whom our neighbours had brought home, little Minette, and the lessons I could learn from her trust and playfulness. Since then she became a regular feature in our house, coming over early in the morning for what I suspect was her second breakfast and generally exploring under the settee and in the garage, sitting beside me with loud purring or chasing flies at the window.
When I arrived home today my neighbour came to meet me with tears in her eyes. Minette had been attacked in the evening time by another cat and had been badly wounded. Despite the best efforts of the vet she was in too much pain and the decision was made to put her down. My neighbours could not sleep the night she was struggling between life and death, their children really upset at the loss of their little pet.
I was saddened by the loss of this little friend, who brought so much joy each day. I know that my sense of loss is not as great as that of my neighbours, and that the kitten was just a few months old. However, we suffer small losses and disappoinments each day. As I have posted before, Stephen Levine reminds us that grieving that has to go on for all the little losses and disappointments that happen throughout our days. He calls this “our ordinary, everyday grief” which builds up following the “disappointments and disillusionment, the loss of trust and confidence that follows the increasingly less satisfactory arch of our lives”.
How to deal with this loss today and the other reminders that life is less than satisfactory at times? I am increasingly noticing the dialogue in my life between the the seeming opposities of attachment and flight, drawing close and keeping distance. And the wisdom traditions seem to have different teachings which emphasize these different dynamics in the soul. It is not hard to find statements that recommend detachment or flight, such as the traditional Buddhist exhortation to frequently remind ourselves that “we and everyone we hold dear will die”. It is clear that some detachment from changing reality is necessary, especially when one sees too much fulfillment in the material aspects of this world. However, that does not work for me today. In relationships I can sometimes I use that idea as an excuse not to engage. I prefer to see Minette’s short life as being almost perfect, in that she lived fully in this world celebrating her closeness to her family and to us in a joyful way. She trusted and loved fully and did not hold back. Her personality was to be attached and to engage. As I wrote when I first met her, she existed without running the story lines, based on the wounds in our own relationships, which lead us to mistrust and hold back. She did not worry about the meaning of life. She lived.
The soul has an equal task and commitment, to find the treasures and explore the ins and outs of life by being attached. Just as there is spiritual practice in search of the highest and most refined reaches of human potential, so there is soul practice in pursuit of the juices and nutriments of life’s entanglements.
Thomas Moore, Soulmates
When different worlds collide
When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one out by the other;
regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Sunshine
Sometimes one is struck by the goodness and care of people and how they bring kindness into the world. Sometimes one can only be grateful for this care. They remind us that the true purpose of life is best understood in terms of our capacity to receive and give love. The human heart is at its deepest and the mind most spacious when we act in accord with this capacity.
In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.
St John of the Cross
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