Kindness Like Flowers Falling Everywhere

Poems as prayer flags

There are times when we feel such a deep connection with our surroundings, it feels as if our skin has melted away and what we are has melded with the world around us.

The following poem was written in such a moment as I sat in bed writing on a yellow pad as I am now.

Even now, reading that poem releases a fresh sense that deep connection with not only my own body but that which animates it and all I see. That which has no name, for the names we so often give it fall so short. But we feel it—the tenderness that underlies the universe and animates it—that which makes it a uni-verse.

We feel it when we slip into the stream of things that embraces us, individually and collectively. We feel the profound and paradoxical effect of being both particle and wave at the same time.

While this poem wasn’t meant to be a morning prayer, I named it that for the reverence I felt in the act of putting words around that experience.

Morning Prayer

Everywhere I look I see you,
I see us. This fragile hand,
this blue pen, this yellow pad.

These curved fingers gently
embracing the eagerness of
 your movements across the page.

This tender paper accepting
all we write. These words rising
up and lying down, so simple.

You are this beating heart, this circle
of breath, this wide sphere of silence
that enfolds us. This soft sigh.

The day awaits. It pours out of us
whole and clear, unending.

How kind you are. Kindness like
flowers falling everywhere.

By Deborah J. Brasket (2021)

These moments when the hard edges between us and all else dissolve rarely last. Yet if our spiritual practice was this alone, tending toward kindness in our engagements with the mundane world, the animate and inanimate, it would suffice.

Sometimes I think of these poems that I and others write in moments of clarity as prayer flags to remind us of who and what we are when the barriers between us dissolve. To remind us of that sacred sense of I or Us which is the reality behind what we commonly conceive of as the “real world” with all its hard, harsh, unkind edges. It’s especially needed during these times of war and strife and division that headline our newsfeeds.

We need these poems—what one poet claims is the thing we die for lack of.

If you’ve read this far, please let me know in the likes and comments below.

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy these posts as well.

The Poetry that Saves Us

On Regret and Kindness

Wheeling Away on the Isle of Pines

The image above is by Odilon Redon, a French symbolist, and one of my favorite artists.