Personal Protective Equipment + Puzzles, Poetry & Kindness.

I’m suddenly into poetry, and now puzzles--two things I never liked or understood as a child.

Kindness is something I’ve always been into, though I don’t always manage it. 

If I were 20, I’d say about this pandemic: “I am soooo over it.” (Okay, I do say that, even though I’m way older). Which means I’m not. But I want to be. Or I want it to be. And though we can begin to glimpse the horizon of over-ness, it’s not.

A few days ago, in my determination to “feel better” (which, I know, according to Buddhism, I’m not supposed to be trying), and to avoid ordering from Amazon (yes, they should be avoided!) and to do something different than going for a walk in the park, I set out for a walk across town to a small bookstore I love--to buy poetry: a cool place called Book Culture. (I mean, how can you not want to buy a book there?)

There, at the cool bookstore, I saw puzzles for sale. I was suddenly seized with the urge to buy one. A cute one: 500 pieces, with little pictures of New York scenes (what can I say? I’m a devoted New Yorker).

As I was browsing, this person came along who wanted to browse in the same spot where I was. In her anxiety over Covid, and her impatience at my occupying the space she wanted, she was unkind and short-tempered. She shoo-ed me away and said in an authoritative voice, “I’m going to have to ask you to move.”

My blood pressure rose, I grumbled an incoherent protest, but moved away. It pissed me off. 

I wasn’t happy with myself for reacting the way I did. I met unkindness with unkindness. 

Then I got home and discovered for the first time how meditative and peaceful doing puzzles is.

You’re hyper-focused, you look at the detail of the tiny pieces, then the big picture, then the detail again, and so it goes, slowly, until you have the satisfaction of placing each individual piece in its place. 

And you sigh and smile with each little piece placed correctly. Aaaah. The beauty of it, seeing how all the pieces fit together into the one big Whole. 

Like the words and images of a poem. Focusing on the minutiae of life. The mundane. Because what else is there, really, as poet Naomi Shihab Nye says? We’re not living in Star Wars; we’re living in our own little lives, filled with tiny details, many of them beautiful, if only we take the time to look. 

That’s the kind of thing the double parsha this week presents to us: detail after detail, repeated again and again, of who and what and how the Dwelling Place for God, the Mishkan, will be constructed and decorated to make One Beautiful Whole to be carried through the desert. 

Once again, the Israelites are asked to bring their special gifts from the heart (so much repetition) and now also their special skills, until it’s too much and they are told to stop. 

Their offerings, of a generosity that comes from the heart, are a practice in kindness and the way we should be treating each other, our fellow earthlings. They carry beauty, like puzzles and poetry (not like that woman in the bookstore or my reaction to her).

The following excerpt from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye was written years before this pandemic--more than a half century, in fact! But it holds an experience and also an intention for how to live. 

It’s called “Kindness:”

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things, 

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved.

All this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness…

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing

You must know sorrow as the deepest thing

You must wake up with sorrow

You must speak to it 

Till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows

And you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore...

Only kindness that raises its head

From the crowd of the world to say,

It is you I have been looking for,

And then goes with you everywhere

Like a shadow or a friend.  

Hmmm. Until we see the size of the cloth. 

While we’re figuring out the puzzle of life and how we fit into the Whole, let’s remember: look for beauty in the details, look for kindness; Bring beauty, bring kindness—as offerings of the heart.

Maybe that’s how we will get through the rest of this when it feels like we’ve lost everything. 

The Whole is still there. We just forget to look at it. 

PPE can protect us from Covid, but let’s not allow it to separate us from the cloth—and the beauty of PPK.