Love, Kindness and Labour

 In September, when I travelled to America, I saw trees arranged so close together that when one fell, it did not hit the ground, but was supported by the trees around it. Everytime I am supported by those around me, my mind travels back to these trees and I think about what a formidable force kindness is. I think about the power of community, how I would have died without the help of my society and the myth of a self-sufficient individual.

The kindness and labour of others is the bed upon which I rest, the food that I eat, the water I bathe and the bathroom in which I do so. The clothes I wear, the knowledge that I acquire, the roads that pave the paths I move through and the shoes on my feet that support my walk. Kindness from friends, from family and from a stranger so seemingly unconnected to me, it all touches my life and makes me full to the brim. This kindness, this love, spills from my eyes and rolls down my cheeks. 

As the flowers ressurect from the dead and colours fill the roadsides once more, as the flame trees bloom and decorate the grounds around them with fallen blossoms, I have come alive as well.

The month of March has shown me so much kindness, I am truly grateful for all these blessings. I am inspired to show kindness to others, to save them from discomfort and difficulty the same way I have been saved. To have others experience the relief that comes after being unexpectedly helped. 

Nowadays, to witness cruelty and wickedness is debilitating and killing. Before, it was merely horrifying but now my days are reduced with each instance of evil I witness. It makes me feel extremely grateful, and it makes feel extremely sinful because who am I to receive such blessings? And who are they to be punished for merely breathing or daring to be different? Who is anyone to have the power to inflict such pain on others? 

The beauty in acts of kindness make the ugliness in acts of wickedness only more repugnant. A human, like any other, refusing to recognise the humanity in another. A being like any other refusing to see the inherent value in the world around them. 

To love is a powerful ideology, so powerful that it is the love from others that keep the world moving. It is the love, kindness and labour of others that deliver a babe into this world, it is upon this love, kindness and labour that life is formed. We are absolutely nothing without each other. If not you, my love, who will help me sew my clothes? Who will make the thread, the needle, the material, the scissors, the chalk and the machine to sew these clothes? Who will help make these? Who will help you, my love, with the pattern for the clothes? And if not for you, my love, why do I learn to do anything? Why do I learn to plant crops? To heal illnesses? To cook food? 

Our lives depend wholly on each other, we cannot make sense of a world without one another.