We Need More of That

While the news
often features the worst of humanity,
there are a billion acts
of human kindness every hour of every day!
Take another breath and sense this truth.
~ Jack Kornfield

Saturday morning when John got up he told me there was blood on his pillowcase and sheets. He assumed the blood came from his nose although it’s not like he has anything more than normal for him going on with his sinuses.

I learned how to clean up blood using peroxide during a trauma with a precious friend years ago…. so I set to work. As I was working, I saw John’s face and he had such disgust — like he was feeling angry or guilty about my having to clean that up. It just about broke my heart. I stopped what I was doing walked over where he was standing in front of the chest of drawers. I just put my arms around him and told him to please not have that attitude toward himself.

A few miles from here is a hospice garden. It was mindfully designed as a space of serenity and for years was beautifully tended. Benches and bricks wore memorial plaques. Butterflies graced the bushes and bees buzzed, all enjoying the nectar of plantings perfectly placed. Sadly, now the benches are overturned and the garden is overgrown. But there amidst the unruliness still stands the most perfect wind feature I have ever experienced.

It was windy and it was Saturday and as I was riding my bike over there, I began to cry. Tears of release flowed with the awareness of deep forgiveness for all the times I’ve been the one who has been critical rather than kind. Critical of John. Critical of myself. Critical of this wonderful world.

I shared all of that during Sunday morning’s meditation’s after-sharing.

Virginia told about the divisiveness in her community about current events and about having seen a video on Instagram.”Irene’s Entropy” posted about having been hired to do a gig, along with a couple of bands but then the next door neighbor also was having a party with an outdoor band! Separating these two backyards was a simple chain link fence. Ugh…. and to make matters worse, these neighbors did not even speak the same language, one English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking.

Irene is bilingual so she went to the neighbors. Everyone was sorry for the mix-up. They decided what would work would be to alternate. She would do a couple of songs, then the other band would do a couple of songs. So she started out with a couple of Fleetwood Mac songs and when she finished the Mexican band started cheering for her! Then when their band finished a couple of songs, she started cheering for them and all the people joined her. Back and forth, this went on for two hours.

When it was their last song Irene said, “Hey, do you guys know any songs in Spanish that I could sing with you?” They asked if she knew
‘You’re Still The One’ by Shania Twain. She said, “Absolutely!”

He leaned toward her across the chain link fence separating them and asked, “Are you going to sing it from the United States or are you going to cross the border, I mean the fence?” She crossed the fence and sang with the band, and the people from her side of the fence came over too. After the song finished they took a big group photo of everyone together!

The after-sharing also included Karuna sharing a true story about two men in India who had to leave their home town during the pandemic because there was no work. They were not friends. They were separated by the caste system and by their different religious beliefs. They became friends in their dire circumstances and when they were on the bus together going back to their homes, one man became sick. It was not Covid, but because of the pandemic and the fear the man was put off the bus in the middle of nowhere. The other man would not leave his friend, so he got off the bus too.

Left as they were, he could not save his friend from dying of dehydration. What he did, however, was almost unbelievable. He managed to get the body back to the man’s family so his friend could be properly mourned and the body respectfully tended.

Irene closed her podcast speaking about people that love and believe in themselves so much that they start believing in their neighbor. “That they cross borders and fences and language barriers to believe in each other and hold these human experiences. Where we can appreciate and love the fact that we are human. That we are mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and friends and that we are all experiencing the same things in life. Birthdays and anniversaries and some get cancer or someone’s dying. Someone is grieving. Someone is loving. Someone is enjoying life. These things are what make us human. We need more of that….”

There are a billion acts of human kindness every hour of every day!

We need more of that….