I enjoy uploading pictures to Flickr. It's a wonderful place. Luka Bloom — Before Sleep Comes The greenhouse was filled with proper ladies from the garden club, doing what garden club ladies do, which is apparently to be proper and to politely ignore some of the more startling and explicit realities of these flowers. — April 17, 2005 In this world, you must be a bit too kind to be kind enough. — Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux In every moment of genuine love, we are dwelling in God and God in us. — Paul Tillich "Teaching a Child the Art of Confession" by David Shumate I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here.	April 6, 2006 Kindness as medicine Something I'm still not really prepared for is how much the world needs kindness. Something I had not fully realized til lately is how truly sad so many people are. Why is everybody sad? I don't know. Bad families? Depressing jobs? Something in the water, something in the air? Do they, like me, worry about the melting polar ice caps? I wonder if people two hundred years ago were this sad. I'm still spending a lot of time at the Very Large Multinational Corporation. I wonder a lot about the best way to relate to my co-worker. I have been struggling mightily in my relationship with him. It takes lots of energy for me to spend all day in the office with him. Sometimes I just want to yell at him. I want to make sure that he knows how difficult I find it to be around him all the time. I feel like he needs more kindness from me that I can really muster. Although I don't know what to think about God and divine mandates and all of that right now, sometimes it really does feel like God has put a difficult, sad person in my life and said, Here is a difficult, sad person that you need to be very kind to. Because kindness can have such a remarkable effect on everybody in the room. It can soften his behavior. It can even soften mine. Asheville, Early Girl Eatery. The Very Large Multinational Corporation is filled with people who are worried about their jobs and their cars and their house payments and their insurance coverage. The funny thing is, there are children around this town who have no idea what it means to be sad or worried or anxious. They don't know what it means to be depressed, to hate themselves. Several years ago, when the Dalai Lama was at a conference with other Buddhist teachers, a western teacher brought up the subject of self-hatred. The Dalai Lama did not know what she was talking about. The concept of self-loathing had to be explained to him by the westerners. I think it took quite a bit of explaining before he got it. And it's not like the Dalai Lama is a slow dude. Isn't it striking how happy children are, how perpetually joyful? Why do they get to be that way? At what point do we forfeit that right? Why do we adults consider that "childlike" behavior? When very young children are in the room, they command everyone's attention. We sit and are amazed by their unfiltered experience of reality. Everything is so immediate and sincere and uncomplicated. The tiniest little discoveries bring such pleasure. When did we get so complicated? Where did all these layers come from? Lately I think that it's our job, our invitation as humans, to re-enter that place of simplicity and purity that we were all born in. But this time, we come to it from a place of maturity and experience. We've seen the suffering of the world. We've cried those tears ourselves. But we choose to remember where we came from. We bring all of our hard-earned wisdom to bear in the new simplicity and purity of the smallest moments. Son and father Jex and Seth. Checking something out on the carpet. I would like the adults to take some cues from the children. We have become so disembodied. We have fallen so deeply in love with our own intellect. It's just making us depressed. A few nights ago I was over at my boyfriend's house. We were eating grilled cheese sandwiches and talking about square dancing (frankly, this is common behavior for the two of us). When we were talking about square dancing, I started remembering my very early days of dancing, when I would go over to the next door neighbor's house and practice clogging in their carport. Jeff Lord was the name of our neighbor, and he taught clogging and buckdancing lessons to some neighborhood kids (yes, that's buckdancing, not breakdancing). Oh, my, how I loved going over there. That is where my love for dancing first found "official" expression. (Though I have lots of good memories of really busting a move to Captain & Tennille's Greatest Hits in my family's own carport.) On Sunday night with Rob, I was remembering this one particular routine that Jeff Lord had taught me and a couple of other neighborhood kids. It was a very carefully choreographed dance that went with one certain song. I loved this little dance he taught us. Most of my memories of the song were lost, and my memories of the dance steps were certainly gone. But for the past couple of years I have had a little phrase from this song lodged in one part of my brain. I started telling Rob about this. The clogging, the routine, the carport, the song I couldn't quite remember. He asked me to share the little piece of the song that I did remember. I said, "It was a modern country song. I just remember something about the windshield wipers making a rhythm in the rain." He said, "Oh, right. I know that one. It's an old Eddie Rabbitt song. 'Rabbitt' with two t's." (I practically shouted, "How did you know that?" He shrugged, "Well, I used to listen to a lot of country music growing up.") I went to iTunes and they had Eddie Rabbitt's Greatest Hits right there and I clicked buy now and all of a sudden I was back rockin' out in Jeff Lord's carport: Well the midnight headlight find you on a rainy night Steep grade up ahead slow me down makin no time Gotta keep rollin Those windshield wipers slappin out a tempo Keepin perfect rhythm with the song on the radio Gotta keep rollin Ooh I'm driving my life away, looking for a better way, for me Ooh I'm driving my life away, looking for a sunny day, oh me (Rob didn't even blink or scratch his head or rub his chin thoughtfully when I made an extremely vague reference to a rain falling on the windshield in a country song. He just said, "Yeah, that's Eddie Rabbitt. Two t's.") What was I worried about when I was eight years old, dancing in the carport? I cared about my kick-ass clog shoes. I cared about that great song. I cared about dancing around with the other neighborhood kids, moving my body around to the music. There was a pervasive sense that life was good, and that it was going to carry me to the places I needed to go. I think I'd like to get back to that.