Most of us spend a lot of time waiting for the right moment, by which I mean the moment when everything is as we want it to be: the laundry done, the faucet fixed, the kids all getting along with each other. We wait for it to rain, or for it to stop raining. For the pandemic to be over. For a baby to be born, or for the kids to leave the house. Wait until we get the promotion, the car, the partner. The conditions we place on our experience of life are endless.
And when I’m struck by a moment of sanity, I notice those conditions falling away, if only for an instant. The house is a mess, and yet, here I am, as I was earlier today, accepting a rose from a woman I don’t even know, who, on the small country road where I walk with my husband, ran after me to extend her hand and offer a flower the most brilliant shades of pink and apricot, the petals ruffled like petticoats. “Here!” she said. “For you!” And I don’t know what was more beautiful: the rose, or the effort she made to deliver it. For the whole walk, it glowed, a presence, between us.
Meanwhile, wars waged on, the hospital wards remained full, many went to bed hungry. How do we live in the gap between the hoped-for and the real?
We want the world to be less broken. Ourselves to be less broken. To love an unbroken person. But here we are. So many days, it’s difficult to carry on. The simple, mammalian pleasure of touch can be the anchor we need. Or witnessing a beloved engaged in an everyday task—like washing dishes, or braiding a child’s hair—and there it is, the breath of the sacred.
What we really want to know is, “Am I welcome here? Am I part of the tribe? Do I have a place?” And so, when a stranger offers a flower, it seems possible. Possible that we are meant to be exactly where—and who—we are. That we are meant.
The most memorable moments of my life are often the smallest. Not my college graduation (a blur), but the moment a little girl took the ends of my scarf when I was walking through a crowd at the farmer’s market, and began to twirl, inviting me into an impromptu pas de deux. It seemed no one else saw it, and so it felt as if we’d stepped outside of time.
Kindness is not sugar, but salt. A dash of it gives the whole dish flavor. I want to keep remembering, to keep living into these moments and the worlds they contain. To know they are where the world I want to live in is made. That it is made right here, in the heart of the broken, the ordinary. These poems remind me. These voices give shape to that world. They show a way.
Danusha Laméris