Weave in Kindness to Those in Your Community

We are back for our final week of the mantra that we are working on this month, which is Weaving in Kindness. So this week we are going to talk about how we can weave in kindness for our community, for the world. So having kindness beyond ourselves and beyond those that we love. This week I’m going to give a passage that feels like it ties so beautifully into this mantra. This is from the book, The Exquisite Risk, Daring to Live an Authentic Life, by Mark Nepo.

Somewhere, in a time like our own, a father is pensively trying to solve the world’s problems when his little boy comes in and days, “Father, I want to help.” The weary man appreciates the gesture but only feels the child’s presence as a hinderance. But the boy persists. So the father takes a map of the world and rips it into little pieces, gives them to the boy and says, “I know you like puzzles. You can help by piecing the world back together.” The boy protests, “but father, I don’t even know what the world looks like!” His father laughs, “nonetheless, this is how you can help,” and he sends him off, expecting that this will occupy his son for days.

And so the pensive man returns to his weary reflections. Two days later, his son comes bounding in, shouting, “Father! Father! I’ve put the world back together!” And sure enough, all the torn pieces are taped into a beautiful whole. His father is stunned. “But how did you do this?”

The boy is eager to show him and turns the map of the world over, saying, “on the back was a picture of a person, Father. I put the person back together and then turned it over and the world was back together!”

This simple story carries profound wisdom that when we put ourselves back together, we put the world back together. That each of our unfathomable journeys is a torn piece in the living puzzle that is the world. That each time we take the equisite risk toward being whole, towards living in the open, towards recognizing and affirming that we are, at heart, each other, we put the world back together. The truth is that each of our struggles matters, and we need each other to turn the story of our lives over to see how they so beautifully go together. Isn’t all our work about the picture of the person and the picuture of the world and how the thousand torn pieces wait to be joined?

So when we put kindness into ourselves and watch our words that we use with those we love, and let that radiate into the world… it helps put the world back together.

Sending so much love, namaste