Small Kindnesses ....

So I generally sit on the side of the bed for a few minutes each morning and scan the news on my phone, not an uplifting practice in contentious times.

More destruction in Ukraine, illegal border crossings trending upward, disastrous fire in South Africa, a new tactic in Texas to torture women who might be thinking of seeking an abortion.

Here in Iowa, school districts are preoccupied still with deciding how thoroughly to erase traces of LGBTQ+ people from libraries and hallways in order to appease religious fundamentalists.

Then I happened upon "Small Kindnesses," a short poem by California-based Danusha Lameris --- very popular for a time during early days of the pandemic.

And that reminded me of how often these days we deal with people as abstractions rather than reality in both the news and everyday face to face encounters --- and also of how simple it is, now and then, just to be kind.

Now I'm not little Miss Mary Sunshine, so won't promise that random acts of kindness piled one atop the other eventually will bring world peace. But I do know that occasional acts of kindness, deliberate or instinctive, make me feel better.

SMALL KINDNESSES

By Danusha Lameris

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.”