Healing Arts

If I meet her now, the me of old, I smile at her with compassion and understanding, because I know that she had not realized the power of gentleness.  I can imagine her distraught as she naively slams hard against the immutable surface of reality.  The ever-increasing force of her blows were received with an unchanging ambivalence and her strikes returned in equal proportion.  Crippled by utter helplessness, she bruised and bled a thousand wounds and cried alone in misery and confusion.

She used to think that she had to fight her way through the world because you need strength to hold your own in the battlefield of life. She needed not only armor but artillery to protect herself.  To be strong meant having the will and the power to oppose, confront, and inflict harm when threatened.  She struggled to be free to journey through life to discover herself and the meaning of her existence.  Swathed in her ignorance, she forgot that the path set before her was both her riddle and her answer.

She believed that the world was an unsafe place and one had to be invulnerable in order not to get hurt.  In the face of confrontation, she considered acquiescence a weakness and self-restraint a flaw. If you could not stand up and fight for yourself, your life would be taken from you – your opinions would not be considered, feelings disregarded, desires repressed, and actions prohibited.  It was the ultimate capitulation.  And to surrender was the wrong above all wrongs, because fighting for what you believed was life’s singular purpose. Living was a battle, every inch of the way, and victory brought forth your destiny.

Gentleness meets reality and greets it with the accepting smile of a familiar friend.  Reality is not the force of a hostile opponent, but a deliberate terrain of steeps and valleys.  Gentleness can pervade the skies and traverse many  borders, enduring all manner of storms.  For gentleness knows the beauty at the end of a torrential downpour, when the rain drops on the wet leaves glitter in the reflection of the sun.  Gentleness is a persevering traveler that knows its destiny and embraces the adventure.

Gentleness is boundless in its power to be, to recreate, to give and to nurture.   It is in gentleness that one experiences the expanse of freedom, the breadth of generosity, and the depth of compassion. Its fate lies in its steadfast remembrance of its mission.  Its clarity is hosted by its consciousness: every breath, thought, feeling, word, and action is flexible in form yet deliberate in purpose.  Its wisdom appears in its restraint in the face of fear, anger, and compulsion. Its strength is in the love of the journey itself.