Unexpected Gifts

Sometimes it takes an act of aggression to discover random kindness.

Happy holidays! After circling around a couple of times in a small lot, I waited as someone got in her car and prepared to back out. The woman in the car behind me began honking her horn and wildly gesticulating from behind her steering wheel. I took some deep breaths, but the honking continued. Maybe she didn't understand that we were in a parking lot and I was waiting for someone to pull out. I got out of my car and as I approached hers, she swung her door open, screaming, "Move your car!"

"I am waiting for this parking place," I said. I got back in my car and pulled into the spot that had indeed opened up. She whipped her car around to the other side, got out and continued yelling: "You just couldn't walk five feet!" I explained again that there was no other spot at that moment. She continued yelling, her blue eyes blazing.

"Wow," I said. "Happy holidays." Okay, I was slightly sarcastic at his point, but still not yelling. "Let's calm down." My heart was pounding fast and hard.

"Oh, calm down, calm down!" She shrieked, mimicking my gesture of surrender. "You know you approached my car, I can report you for assault." I smiled -- actually, I might have laughed -- and I walked away into the coffee shop. As I tried to calm my flailing heart, a young man stood next to me and spoke. He had the nicest face I've seen in a long time.

"Wow," he said, "that was crazy. It was so obvious you were waiting for a place."

As I told him that she said she was going to call the police to press charges for assault, she walked into the coffee shop and continued her rant.

"I have your license plate number, I can report you for assault."

"No," my new friend said. "That was not assault. I was a witness."

I thanked him, bought him his coffee and got his information, just in case I did need a witness. As he wrote his name and number, I told him that a few years ago, I could have been that woman and how grateful I was that I was no longer allowed stress to destroy me. He nodded and handed me his information.

"Thanks, Alex," I said. Then I registered the last name. "Wait," I said, "you know my son!" I told him his name. "I'm his mom."

"Oh my god," he said, "I've heard so much about you! I've heard he's doing great."

"He is," I said, "he is."

We kept shaking hands and grinning, as though we'd each found our long-lost friend.

"Gimme a hug," Alex said.

There we stood, embracing in Starbucks. My heart calmed. Unbridled aggression and a hug, both with strangers, in the span of five minutes. There he was, a witness in more ways than one. In few words, we acknowledged the healing in my son, too.

Thank you stressed out woman, two weeks before Christmas, for reminding me what really matters: There is real random kindness in the world, healing is a force more powerful than sickness. Whatever  whatever my worries as I face a lean bank account on the edge of the holidays, they are nothing compared to my depth of gratitude for the goodness that is afoot.

Fast of Words

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
--Henry David Thoreau

In my family, I am the talker, the storyteller. I have always been compelled to entertain with my gift of gab. With my mobile face and energetic gestures, I can be a one-woman show. It gets downright exhausting sometimes. So on a recent spiritual retreat, I felt an instant sense of relief when the leader announced that we would be in silence.

Silence, for me has often been something inflicted, a punishment or banishment, a withdrawal of emotional warmth: "the silent treatment." But this was not a punishment. Instead, it would be 'fasting from words,' a phrase coined by Henri Nouwen in The Way of the Heart, something cleansing, purifying. Much to my surprise, I welcomed silence like water on a desert hike. When I told my husband about my joy meeting silence, he was also surprised. A quiet man in the best of mood, he is in a constant fast from words, except in the morning, when I do not want to talk. And sometimes I suffer in his silence, misreading it as a withdrawal of love, as I did when my mother sent me to room to think about what I'd done wrong.

I grew up in a mostly quiet house. The brown shag carpet, earth-toned upholstery and abstract paintings cast a cool shadow over everything as my mother wrestled with her private demons, sometimes talking to herself aloud in the shower or in her bedroom. Sometimes my parents listened to music, but it was sad music to my young ears, like Joan Baez, singing about the war in Vietnam. Anti-war politics was the soundtrack in our house. Our dinner conversations usually began with my father ranting about Berkeley-in-the-60s politics, as he fielded urgent phone calls about who needed bailing out of jail for refusing to be drafted, who had gone underground, who the FBI was watching, that suspicious van on our street that neighbors suspected was full of wire tapping equipment, or when the Black Panthers would be coming to our house to hold a meeting. These were not times to protect children from potentially scary stories. We were treated as little adults.

Then silence would descend over the table. That's when I would grow animated. Talking was a way of bridging our private loneliness, sometimes frantically trying to lift the energy gathered around our egg-shaped white laminate table. When I wasn't talking, I was writing. I spent much time filling journals, mostly trying to figure out what made my mother tick, what ailed her and how I might fill the hole of her own deficient childhood.

I loved to talk. I knew how to make my father laugh, or even cry. One time, after my first child was born, I told my father a story that made him faint. It was right after my son was born and the delivery was dramatic, complete with an emergency c-section and general anesthetic. It wasn't a bloody story, but apparently I conveyed all the loss of control and fear that experienced. With my little 10-day-old baby asleep at my side, my parents listened intently. My father grew annoyed, said he felt sick, told me to stop. I did. We stood to leave and he fell over like a tree onto the floor. Now that's a powerful story, he later told me.

While my chattiness has always been a stand against silence, a incessant attempt to heal the darkness that threatened to envelop my home, here in the woods, in the cozy lodge, silence was a gift, not a punishment. We ate in silence and far from awkward, it was musical; the clink of the silverware on the plates, the whisper of chairs sliding out as we served ourselves more food. My mouth was full of taste and scent. In the woods, during meditative walks, golden light fell through the trees and sound emanated from everything. Even light has a sound. I could hear the glimmering of the spiderwebs in the sunlight. I joke with my kids that I can hear so much better when I put my glasses on, but here in silence, it was true: Silence reveals.

Silence is space. The first time I experienced this space, I was in high school -- arguably the most chatty time in life -- on a 24-day survival course in the Sierra Nevada wilderness. We hiked over 200 miles, carrying heavy packs, twice for 24 hours straight, rock climbed and struggled to cooperate with people, some of whom we never liked in school and even less out there in the wilderness. In the middle of all that was solo. It was meant to be a vision quest, which I was cynical about for years until I realized solo was the most life-changing three days of my young life. During this fast from words, human contact and food, I saw no one and heard no human voice -- not even my own until the second day.

I had sworn I would not speak aloud as that would surely mean I'd lost my mind. But when I found myself anxious that it might rain and my mind raced ahead to hypothermia, I made up a little Winnie-the-Pooh-like poem: It's nice to know that if it rains, I'll be okay. I repeated this, while I rocked back and forth on a granite slab that overlooked a deep ravine. There above the tree line, I could hear the wind rushing through the trees below. As my voice calmed me, three deer ascended high plateau. They stood there, not 30 feet from me, a buck, a doe and a fawn. I froze. They froze. But I soon realized that they had come when I was rocking and speaking, as though I'd called them. I resumed my rocking and quietly mouthed my simple poem. They began grazing around me. Every few minutes, the doe and I locked eyes.

This story floated back to me during my silent retreat, reminding me as the deer once did that I am never alone, no matter how solitary. Though I will always be a social being, thriving on stories and the company of others, I know that there is nothing more restorative than silence. It is only in silence that we can really hear, see and feel -- which is perhaps also the reason we avoid it. You never know what will come up. But I fear it less and crave it more. After all, something wild, something magical might come up.

At the end of my weekend retreat, I returned home, excited to tell my husband all my discoveries about silence. I even find a way to turn silence into a story. But something else happened, too. At least in the immediate afterglow of my silent retreat, I did not feel so much pressure to speak. I became a better listener. I was able to hear those I love and in doing that, see them as they are. Not as I want them to be or remember them being, but as they are right now. That is the first act of love.