When Kindness Hurts

‘What is compassion?’ I blurt out one morning, not expecting an answer. I don’t mean to speak. I’m a cliff-side with old gnarled pines. The question falls from me like dislodged stone.

‘It’s love, but it has hurt in it,’ my child says calmly, pausing in their preparation for the day ahead, as if describing how to mix a paint colour: it’s forest-green, with a bit of neon blue.

Artist, Liz Abbott, has a painting of a broken tree in a field. The break near the top of the old kahikatea is sharp and painful. The background cobalt sky aches. It’s the damn sun and the terrible beautiful day. Yet the tree grows, out to the side, verdant, alive. For a while, the break and the recovery are all I see. Then I notice there are smaller trees near the central tree: a gathering-around. Gnarled roots sink into grass, plunge unseen into earth and further into the slake of cool groundwater. The kahikatea is anchored, broken, growing. It is not alone. It is.

Years ago a colleague-friend of mine was dying. My colleague had been sick for some time, most of our work team went to visit. I, however, was afraid. What if I became overwhelmed? What if I didn’t know what to say? What if it was unbearable? A trembling web of reasons. I didn’t go. At my colleague's funeral, for the first time, I was truly conscious of regret. The dry salt in the mouth of it. The ringing cold. The roaring undertow. I saw with horrible clarity how my attempts to protect myself had not in fact protected me at all, and had most definitely robbed me of last, precious contact.

I resolved then, to deliberately enter the roll of these waves. 

It’s water that smacks and splashes. It’s brown with churned sand, broken shells, torn seaweed. In allowing myself to sway, I find my feet again and again, toes curl into sand, lift with the next swell. Land, lift, land. Arms outstretched, all muscles are engaged. There are no words, only cool water. Sometimes awe. Sometimes peace. Salts dissipating in the wind and tide. Weight-bearing, my bones strengthen. I’m warm from movement. I become solid. Fascia bends between muscle and bone. A substance shapes which could be: integrity. It could be: trust. Later, staggering to the dunes, I’m exhausted, truthful, spent. Love with hurt in it. My tears have fallen into the greater water of the ocean. 

The poet David McDade describes this witnessing as a type of radiance.

Untitled

still above the dwindling river

between heaven and low water
a filament of electric blue
radiates from the centre

on whispers of borrowed light
the last dragonfly of summer

by David McDade 

[poem published with permission]

Artwork by Kirstie McKinnon.