*This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I will receive a small compensation at no extra cost to you. This helps keep my blog ad-free.
Small Kindnessesby Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat."
You can find this poem in Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection.
This month I’m hoping to finish up a few non-fiction books I’m meandering through because my TBR is piled super high. And because I’m soaking in the content and learning a great deal.
Creatrix: She Who Makes by Lucy H. Pearce. The author shares personal stories from her own life as well as the voices of many other creative women. What are the joys, the challenges, the highs and lows of creative living. The exhilarating experiences, the slogging through to finish, finding and making time for creative work in the margins of our busy lives. And I haven’t gotten to it yet, but there’s even a practical section about business and marketing. More when I finish the book!
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katherine Hayhoe. This book could also be titled ‘How to Talk to the Deniers, Dismissers, and Those Resistant to Reality’. LOL. But seriously, in only the first few chapters, the author gives clear ideas and examples on how to talk to people about planetary peril, climate catastrophe, etc. I look forward to reading the rest of it.
Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth by Deepak Chopra. With his clear writing, Deepak takes complex concepts and distills them into easy-to-understand and practice principles for living an abundant life. I’ve already had several aha moments. I’m reading through his explanation of the chakra system at the moment and appreciate the way he takes the ‘woo woo’ out of this yogic way of looking at life.
Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Volume 1: Planet edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer. All I have to do is see Robin Wall Kimmerer’s name anywhere and I immediately have to read it. This is the first volume of a five volume set from the Center For Humans and Nature. Each piece is thoughtful and beautiful and helps the reader understand even more how we are all connected and related and how what we do matters. I am really looking forward to the piece by Kimmerer as well as the one by Drew Lanham in this volume.
Life of Kim 