A little story. A lovely one.
While standing in line at the shop, today, holding a baby in one arm and a pram in the other, the lady in front of me turned.
‘Please go ahead of us. I see you have two little ones and a baby. Please go ahead.’
I could have kissed her beauty.
I could have held her love in the air and said out loud for all to hear, ‘this is the kindness I choose.’
Instead, I said thank you.
Once. And once again.
True sunshine.
The end.
Kindness is everywhere if we look hard enough.
And you’ll know how it feels, because you’ll know how it looks.
And if you know how it looks…
you’ll know your most important identity.
You’ll know how to be beautiful you.
Kindness is beautiful.
See it, feel it, know it kind of beautiful.
Or…not know it.
Kindness is kindness, either way.
Kindness isn’t something we need to think to life.
It is not a plan, it is not an order.
It’s a heart thing.
Our job is just to listen.
And breathe.
So, don’t try to be kindness.
Just move over.
To the left of the Sun, to the right of the moon.
And I promise you,
I promise.
Kindness will be there soon.
I gave my soul to the garden.
I gave her my heart, I gave her my dreams.
And now, I am weary.
So weary,
I am nothing more than this.
But how beautiful it feels to have come.
To have given a piece of my life,
however small.
Here I have left my heart
and searched for yours in advance.
Hello, until tomorrow.
Goodnight,
until the day is sweet and new.
Sometimes I wish I had been born of another culture, a culture of eyes wide open, a culture of hearts wide open.
They say to resist ‘what is’ is to cause your own suffering. Am I suffering? No. But I certainly do ask the question: what if?
Would I be further along in my life journey if, as a child, my sensitivity had been celebrated by my culture, rather than shunned? Would I have saved myself years of healing from the innocent unconsciousness of those around me? Because of a rigid cultural narrative, those who have loved me have accidentally hurt me. I shudder to remember those who have held me in their lives as an insignificant supporting character.
I hope humanity soon understands that the world they see is a choice, rather than a given. I hope the beautiful little soft girls of the world are one day celebrated for the depth and gorgeous attention to detail they bring the world. How shameful that they haven’t been, thus far.
Am I angry that I was brought up starved of female role models? Am I angry that not even my Mother knew how to teach me to truly grow into womanhood? How could she? All she knew was what the western world was. Hardened. Money hungry. Black and white.
There is an aspect of me that is angry. But a bigger part of me understands. There is no one to be angry with. We have all been brought up in boxes. Every single one of us, and when you’re inside of a box (we call them cultures) you truly cannot see there is another way. Another way to see, another way to be. And if you cannot see or be, you cannot teach. You cannot change.
I hope enough eyes are opening, now, to the beauty of individuality.
I hope enough hearts are ready to be free.
I have known a life and more.
I have tasted shame,
I have found my way
on the dark and dreary road.
I am you,
and you are me.
Together,
we are human.
Together we are home.
I will hold your ache in loving arms.
I will be the faith you have lost in the world.
I will shine a light on your breaking heart,
that you may hand stitch the truth
into the fabric of your soul
and know it is safe
to feel.
I will love you.
All the broken you wish not to see,
I will hold you.
I will hold you, love.
Wherever I look,
someone is fighting.
It hurts the softness of me,
this world.
It takes and takes the peace
and I am so afraid to be torn apart
by another day of humanity.
The carnival of dark and dense
dis-ease.
Wherever I look
someone is fighting.
When will enough be enough?
It has been fourteen days and the wind has brought me here.
What happened was quite accidental (but then, is anything ever accidental in the universe?) Rather than my plan expiring as I thought it was going to (for reasons long and complicated) it has rolled over for another year.
For a moment, when the ghastly realisation was made, I thought to approach wordpress and tell them, ‘Thank you, but I’m done, here.’
I never did do that. I never did pick up the phone.
I put this down to orders of the wind. The sway of the universe whispering me to stay just a little while longer. So, here I am, writing these words–half wondering why, half quite sure that there is nowhere else I’d rather be.
Why is it that there are so many segments of us, and why is it that not all segments of us want equally?
Some pieces of me want to be heard, to be known, to be understood and validated by like minded souls who feel a little like they’re swimming around in the ever spinning washing machine of life. Other parts of me want to hide. To never be seen. To only be known by the quiet that surrounds me, the quiet that I am.
I know I must write to experience myself truly.
I know I must create in order to find home.
What else do I know?
I know I’ll always be asking questions that make me feel a little lonely.
I know I’ll always think I know the answers until I, once and for all, understand that there is no one answer. Only the next question, the next step, the next choice.
The wind has brought me here.
And here, in this moment, I am.
It’s funny. To think of the damage caused by cultural norms and stereotypes.
Of course, there are the absolutely beautiful cultural narratives out there. Those that cherish and honour human life by holding it, by respecting it so beautifully that even the hardest of hearts must surely be touched by the story of it all.
I heard a story as beautiful, just the other day. My counsellor told it to me: how, in her culture, when a woman becomes pregnant, she becomes the queen. The whole tribe lavish her with love, care, and most importantly, perhaps…food.
This discussion came about after a lovely tender moment where she looked over at me, my bulging belly sweetly growing a perfect little gift, and offered to bake me something lovely to celebrate the occasion (that’s right, surprise, I’m fourteen weeks pregnant. And how lovely it is, to me. How lovely it is. xx)
But, I digress. Because although there are some absolutely beautiful cultural stories passed on by certain cultures in the world, other cultures do not even realise their own toxicity. (And when I say toxicity, what I mean is…truly, their cultural ideas are heartbreaking and damaging to individuals who do not fit into the selected story being told.)
There are some absolutely wonderful things to be said about the culture I was born into. But one arm of the narrative, an arm that destroyed any hope of me developing healthy self-esteem in my early years, was the idea that vulnerability and softness were somehow character flaws. I was mostly soft.
As it turns out, this soft part of me, this sensitivity, is my super power; a power that helps me soothe, and bring safety to those who need it. A power that helps me tap into the world of everything and nothing, and pull down the words and creativity needed for my writing to touch people in the way that it seems to.
But my culture called me ‘soft’. It told me to ‘harden up’, and it assumed that If I didn’t…then surely I must be broken, at worst. Naive at best. Never have I been these labels.
And if you are a deep and tender heart resonating with these words…never have you been these labels, either.
Always we’ve been perfect.
Just the way we are.
Think of the trillions of flowers, plants and trees out there. Some are soft. Some are hard, shrubs built to last in the wind and rain and hail. None of them judge each other for being ‘wrong’ in anyway. They simply exist.
And so do I.
So do we.
How beautiful,
to know there is love.
There is love.
There is
love.
brooke-cutler.com 