And, Go Gently in the World
The cold, frozen winter mornings teach me things I do not learn in other seasons. A bare, architectural landscape reveals clarity in the bones of sculpted trees and brown brush that wear the colors of Joseph’s Coat—hues of the rainbow as nature awakens in the spring; gold, ochre, and crimson leaves fall in graceful delight in autumn, preceding winter’s breath.
Only now, when a naked landscape is exposed raw, do we see more—even truth
I wrap both hands around a steaming mug of tea, watching the sun’s first colors unfold in layers: butter-yellow slipping like melting wax under lavender hues, thin strokes of blue are brushed across the sky, whiffs of smoky gray clouds punctuate the vista, as the rich, deep orange ember at the heart of the horizon pulsates, announcing that a new twenty-four hours has begun.
A sunrise like this softens a person, reminding us to meet the world with gentleness—something more human than reflex or irritation.
But I forgot.
When I think too much and feel too little, somewhere in that forgetting, even small, tender mercies slip through my fingers.
It’s always easier to pin our irritation on someone or something else, isn’t it? The loud neighbor, the petty comment, the careless cruelty that arrives at the wrong moment.
The truth is simpler, and harder: fear is the genesis of malcontent. It feeds negative feelings, depression, outrage.
Ah, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit I was unkind to the one person I can’t escape—myself. I nurtured—
Fear of pain that doesn’t end.
Fear of aging faster than I can adapt.
Fear of dying before I am finished with who I’m becoming.
And this is where the truth revealed itself, softly, the way winter light slips into a room before a person realizes they are no longer sitting in the dark.
Facing hard truths, no longer looking outward, I began moving through my days in acceptance. I saw what the anger had been asking me to look at—the ache beneath all of it: that pain and fear come when I withhold gentleness and kindness from myself.
The truth is this: The world owes me nothing, while I owe all of myself to the world.
Humanity begins not in great acts, but in the smallest:
to soften,
to breathe,
to be gentle with ourselves,
In those early morning moments, hands wrapped around a mug of tea, winter sunrise unspooling herself slowly, without apology, behind thin, bare branches, I remembered:
Gentleness is not a performance; it is a return—a return to a quiet truth that nothing living thrives under hardness—not bodies, not hearts, not human beings trying simply to continue.
Let your gentleness begin at home in an act of remembrance that your heart—bruised, resilient, stubbornly luminous—has carried you through every hour you thought would break you.
And when the world grows hard again, as it surely will, a return to a gentler way towards yourself and others is not a philosophy; it is the practice of noticing the soul of another—and the quiet pulse of your own.
May you meet the coming days and months ahead in this brand-new year with a gentleness that does not diminish you, but restores you.
In quiet, in reverence,
