some thoughts on gentleness

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of gentleness lately. It all started far before I was conscious of it, as is always the way with such things. But it really sprang to the forefront with the title of a Jen Bervin (swoon!) lecture during my VCFA residency.


The unconscious part had been brooding in my heart for over a year now, the knowledge of how mean and hard I had been for the past long while. Ten years or more, if I am going to be honest. How sarcasm and irony governed my responses like reflex, and how cruel I was to myself and others in an attempt to dissimulate a deep self-doubt and -loathing. It suddenly seemed as though I had washed up on a foreign shore, or on some distant moon, and before I even opened my eyes, I knew I was alone. I was beginning to understand that cruelty as humor can only resist so long before it is simply cruelty. I started to see that my heart had better to offer than judgement.


I began a year of intentional kindness then, to see how it would change me. I failed so completely that I am ashamed. It was much more difficult than I'd imagined. But there were moments when I could feel it working - there were relationships formed and friendships deepened and I experienced some honesty with myself that led me to apply for an MFA in the first place. But it was still something of an exercise, something I was doing without fully understanding why, only knowing that it was important.


So in June, when I found myself suddenly in the midst of exceptionally loving people, who were so common in mind and soft in spirit, that the pieces started to fit for me. I started to really understand the challenge of gentleness and the power of kindness, and I found that for the first time in my life, I really have that capacity. After so long struggling against my family, myself, religion...the list could go on forever, that I was finally at a place where my heart was soft and open.


Of course, once you start noticing something, it begins to appear everywhere. I feel like everywhere I look lately, the word "gentle" appears. I thought I'd share a few of them...


Two weeks ago, on one of those quote-a-day calendars:

Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal;

avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among people.

                                                                                          - Lao Tzu

Last week on So You Think You Can Dance, Marko and Allison danced to Jeff Buckley covering a Smith's song called "I Know It's Over." If you don't know it, the song is about being aware of having failed someone in a deep way, and at the end of a relationship. The part that matters goes like this:

It's so easy to laugh

It's so easy to hate

It takes strength to be gentle and kind

And this morning, while I was thinking about marriage and paging through William Carlos Williams' "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":

It was the love of love,

the love that swallows up all else,

a grateful love, 

a love of nature, of people,

of animals,

a love engendering

gentleness and goodness

that moved me

and that I saw in you.

I'll admit I'm still not sure what it was that first morning, what it was that told me my heart was open after so many years of being fastened shut. But I am working daily now to swallow bitterness and ignore snark. 

Gentleness, I think, from here on out.