How if someone insults or threatens you, your response may be passive, avoiding conflict. But if someone insults or threatens one you love, your response is more passionate and involved?
How you can go for years without eating something you did as a kid, but one smell or one taste will roll back the years?
How you forget others’ suffering if not exposed to it regularly, and can forget there are others less fortunate, even among friends and family?
How we remain acutely aware there are others more fortunate? How we all feel poor at some point, and blame others for it, but when we see another as poor we tend to think it’s their own doing?
How physical pain may be forgotten, but emotional wounds are not? How we don’t notice when we wound others, but they do? How easy it is to wound with words or even a look without realizing it, without even meaning it? How long it takes resentment to fade, once we feel it?
How touchy we all are about different things? How you never really know what another’s soft spot is until you accidentally brush against it? How sometimes you wish that information had been tattooed on their forehead?
How florists’ flowers just don’t smell the same?
How the drone of bees can be musical, until they come too near?
How gardens smell like honey on warm days?
How limitless the sky’s blue is? How we look for that limitlessness in others’ eyes?
How many words of yours your dog or cat knows, and how few you know of his?
How no matter how annoyed we may be to hear a person use “he” or “she” instead of the other, we’re all incensed if someone calls a person or pet “it” and we correct them at once?
How goddess-like or god-like the being next to you is? The glow of spirit in another’s face?
Now — there’s a lot to think about.
Cas
We do look at things from our own point of view, and it’s probably distorted most of the time.
Thanks -
Thanks very much. I spent most of today — well, actully yesterday — battling a messed up computer so this thought provoking piece makes a pleasant end — or beginning. I can’t say I disagree with any of these observations.
What a wonderful set of questions, with so much wisdom in them. The first one really caught my attention, as I am in the middle of a ’situation’ where a friend of mine’s child is being threatened, and we are all circling our wagons. Thanks for this.
You lift my spirit, as on wings of joy and wonder. Thanks. Going right now to learn another “woof”-ful word.