GOD IS KIND

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let's think about God as kind.

I have been reflecting on God as love and applying that to 1 Corinthians 13.  Life with all of its suffering built into nature also reveals much that is kind.

For all of us who are conscious, kindness occurs to us every day in life itself as well as within those sudden expressions of good will we experience from people. 

Much of the kindness we experience that is not from people happens throughout the day. 

I recall the view of the Sequatchie Valley, with its green fields and trees, rolling hills and roads showing itself as I drove around the Highway 111 curve from work.  Beauty embedded in being--the joy of seeing that every day was a kindness from God.

Clouds rolling into San Francisco from the ocean felt like a kindness as I watched from Chapel Hill in Mill Valley.  Once from atop Mount Tamalpais, I saw a yellow pollen mist stretch its tendrils toward that lovely city that never failed to stir me with awe when I watched it from afar.  Beauty embedded in being...

The golden orb weaver whose web stretched across my porch kindly caught gnats and moths.  Never have I seen a spider so lovely and gemlike in the sun. Beauty embedded in being...

Driving through boulevards lined on both sides with huge oaks and their Spanish moss camps draping toward the road feels like a surprise gift left every day for me from an admirer. Beauty embedded in being...

As the poet William Carlos Williams wrote:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Of course, these are not kindnesses in the sense that they were created for me, put in their places for me, and evolved for the sole purpose of pleasing me.  The mockingbird sings for me only insofar as I hear it and love it, but that is not why it sings.

 Our lives unfold in sight, hearing, the ability to touch and smell and taste.  Our brief existences sally forth as our brains form our minds, shape our perceptions, color our world, keep our hearts beating, our lungs breathing, and our bellies nourishing us. 

Our lives are glazed with such kindness within being.  To it we are connected, into it we are thrown, within it we move and have life.

I so much never want to die.  Indeed, eternity is built into the system. The energy that makes up who I am never dies.  It changes form.

Will I be conscious after I am dead?  If I am, it would take an eternity for me to express my gratitude.  To be with the wife whom I adore—she who has the ability to be so interesting it would take several eternities to exhaust her—to be with daughters who are equally as interesting as their mother, to be with others who love me enough, whom I love enough to know in this life—do we all fantasize about such an eternal life?

Maybe the source of this kindness of which I wrote will grant even this last great kindness.  Who can say?

Blessings…