I hope you are well and taking good care of yourself. You can also listen to this piece on my YouTube Channel here: https://youtu.be/rT2JueVFKwQ
It is a hard time to be a human, in many ways. My spring semester of teaching was one of the hardest I have known. Students are both wonderful and truly struggling, and I am trying to be there for them. That, after years of trying to be there for students during the pandemic peak. So many students experienced the deaths of those they love, and there has been so much illness for students, of all kinds, including Covid, mental wellness struggles, and other significant life issues like being without a place to live and food precarities. Their lives have been upended over and again. Like many teachers, I try to be a steady presence of kindness for them.
After translating Practice the Presence by Brother Lawrence, the 17th-century sage I call the Friar of Love for his kindness and calmness, and living with him through his traumatic, precarious days of despot Louis the XIV and the friar’s being part of the 98% of non-privileged persons without access to education, a regular supply of nourishing food, and other human necessities, I am haunted by the feeling that that is where the system and those in power are taking us, wittingly or unwittingly.
After publishing and promoting a book (the two are synonymous now), after giving full-time teaching my all which includes co-designing and co-teaching a 200-seat asynchronous public speaking course, after doing many podcasts and interviews and workshops, and after spending last summer booked to the gills by hosting the Mystics Summit for Shift and by participating in the Bay Area Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute, both amazingly wonderful communities and growth opportunities, I decided sometime in April that I would make this summer my fallow time, and I am, outside family obligations.
On my desk here, I have a few, well, really, quite a few, note cards on which I write reminders and chants. One has a reminder of my microphone type for when I am on Zoom and needing to adjust it, and another has the Buddha Medicine Chant. Others here and there say various things: “CALM & CONFIDENT,” “BE AUTHENTIC.” and “What do you need?”
That last one gathers more meaning lately. I invite you to ask it with me. “What do you need?” When was the last time you asked yourself, “What do I need?” I hear Love asking me, when I see this card: “What do you need, Carmen?”
I need to be kind to myself, even more and more. I need more kindness in the world. Both of these things I can in many ways control. I can definitely and gently increase my kindness to myself and to others.
One way I am kind both to myself and to others is I notice the kindness all around me and work with it to contribute further to it. It’s what stitches the world together. Here are a few examples from my life recently when I went to the grocery store.
My brief exchange with the woman in her 50s whom I love getting as cashier because she always offers a little extra bag for the meat that might drip and wears a mask and is a decent kind human. I have hypogammaglobulinemia, so I wear a mask wherever I go.
During an earlier grocery store trip, she noticed how I put down first breakables like eggs then light, squishable breads then frozen items and then canned goods, and she appreciated it, saying something like, “I do that too.”
The last time I went, I said as I unloaded to the belt: “You’re always so efficient—I’ll try to keep up with you.”
She laughed, breezy like, that let me know she appreciated it.
Then when I got done unloading the cart, I went down to the end since the two teenaged guys with aprons on had stood around chatting and then left in a moseying kind of way. And I picked up one of my cloth bags, and without slowing or missing a beat, she said like a sister would, “How about I’ll finish these and you do bread.”
“Sounds good,” I said, and we made short work of it together.
Those things make the world go round.
When I almost let gravity take my cart into the road in front of the grocery store as I back-pocketed my receipt, I looked up to stop the cart and saw a young teenager driver in a car going past perpendicular to me. I waved appreciatively as they slowed a little and the teenager did the slightest and clearest head tilt up no smile. That was something.
We had communicated community. My wave of thanks, the teenager’s nod.
When I told a friend about this, she texted me back:
Yeah. Decency.
Not difficult and yet so powerful
The head nod is one of my favorite things ever
So my aim in life is to give myself as many kind head nods as possible as well as to give others as many kind head nods as possible, in diverse ways.
May you be blessed.
May you be free from fear.
May you be safe from harm.
May you be strong and healthy.
May you have a calm, clear mind.
May you love yourself as you are.
May you know your own goodness.
May you experience love, joy, and wonder.
May you give yourself the compassion you need.
Thank you for reading.