“I love you.”
Spiritual texts tell us that love is all around. We must show it, not tell it.
Even as a child, I wanted to be told. But, love, in the pragmatic world of poverty, extreme racism, and fear revealed itself as a practical thing, woven into the daily life of meals, clothes, and housing. During the summers we experienced love in visits to the south where hot days in the fields, riding the backs of cows, and filling buckets of clean, tasty water from an underground spring left us tired and happy. Eating freshly slaughtered chicken and meats, farm grown veggies and fruit— figs, grapes, and peaches were my favorites — left us feeling supremely cared for and nourished.
Those things were evidence of love, and for the adults in the world around me this evidence was proof enough. My father would say “show me, don’t tell me” and he was no hypocrite. He lived his life showing through baseball games, circuses, and rides on his back after Thanksgiving dinner.
I embraced the apparent truth that love was show, not tell. And yet, as I grew into womanhood, I began yearning for the words. Perhaps it was because some of the folks that came into my life did not know how to show. They did not come from families of evidence.
In this world where I pray to see a do-nothing Congress get past the extraordinary racism buried in attacks against the president so that they can show some compassion for those who are less fortunate, I think that many of those people do not come from families of evidence. I want to be shown that they have an ounce of feeling for those without insurance, without food, and who have placed their lives on the line to defend them and now need support. Show me; stop the flapping lips.
But I’m getting off track.
Evidence, of course, is mixed. I also experienced evidence that love was far from our door. My mother was not one to exhibit as much as one millionth of an inch of sentimentality. Except for anger, which was constant, she kept her feelings sacredly locked within her until women came together to can fruit and vegetables, cook holiday meals, and talk about their husbands. Only once do I remember her exhibiting sorrow — it is the only day in my memory — and that was when my father pushed her to the floor. Show, don’t tell. The day remains in my mind like a photograph that cannot be destroyed.
Why, sometimes, do I want to hear the words?
I am blessed with a view of the campus park across the street. The leaves have dropped from the trees, and I have a full view of the trail that winds through the college. Parents with toddlers, dog lovers, boys holding girls, and boys holding boys; future track stars in heavy coats force their tired legs uphill. The setting sun presses fat fingered rays through empty branches, covering the brown shrubbery and happy hikers like dripping paint. It’s like a drawing that revals my memories of past walks in forests where I was shown, not told, about love. Show me, I would insist, don’t tell me.
Yet.
I’m open to thoughts…
Sala
wordshavecolor.com 
On: Tenderness
What was it that Otis Redding said? Oh yes.
Try a little tenderness.
Tenderness.
Why is it so challenging to bask in the love that we all desire? I believe that it is everyone’s intention to surround themselves with the softness of life. By that I don’t mean the softness of material things, the silks and satins and cashmere of life. I mean the softness that comes with peace of being… Soft. Tenderness.
It’s a quiet summer afternoon. I’m looking out the window and watching butterflies circle the backyard. They seem completely at ease. Is it because, amazingly, the black cat with the strange green eyes is at ease? Is she practicing cat tenderness? She doesn’t move from her perch as the butterflies and birds flit around her. Only the gray squirrel raises a racket. There is no threat. Softness abounds.
Sunlight fills crevices like liquid. My soul is filled with tenderness. And I, who thrive on seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, want to believe that every human being loves the sun.
The poets, romantics, musicians, spiritual teachers — even scientists — testify to the healing power of tenderness. Go ahead, say it isn’t so. But you’ll find yourself in some very isolated company.
I’m reminded of mornings on my grandparents’ farms. Both maternal and paternal grandparents knew the power of tenderness and peace. My own memories allow me to understand why my mother, in her dementia, retreats to a place of softness and safety.
Not too long ago, I was asked by a health practitioner to remember what that tenderness feels like in my body. I was happy to revisit that glorious childhood experience. Vacations were watercolor mornings, filled with strolls amid the corn, watermelon, and tomato fields with paternal and maternal grandfathers. For me, our small farms and communities played in my mind as barricades against treacherous white men whose daily bread filled them with the hatred required to circle the south looking for unarmed black men and boys.
“Remember what that tenderness felt like,” they say. It’s because currently my life requires the wondrous gift of tenderness: regular rest, naps, real food and more proteins (did I tell you I now eat poultry as well as fish? Gone, gone are those days of self-righteous food Puritanism!) I eat vigilantly, and monitor my emotions. “Get eight hours sleep,” said my dear physiatrist Dr. J.
For 40 years when I thought of South Carolina away from my grandparents’ homes, I thought of a place contaminated with murder and the blood and bones of enslaved black people. With my maternal grandparents gone, their home and land sold, and my estrangement from the conservative religious views of the South, there was no reason to return to that place. History suffocated tenderness.
Then I attended a family reunion in Myrtle Beach and the feelings flooded back. The signs on stores, restaurants, and bathrooms and drinking fountains — “colored” and “white, ” placed there to kill the human spirit while threatening the physical body — were gone.
Those signs had pitted my tender heart against my gentle maternal grandfather. When I was about 10 years old, he took us into the city of Sumter to run errands and buy sweets. As if in slow motion, I found myself bowing my head to drink from a fountain clearly marked “white only.” My grandfather did what he had to do to protect me.
He grabbed me by the collar with such force I thought I would choke. My lips never touched the water. Later on, sitting on the porch in his arms, surrounded by the night songs of frogs and crickets in a dark so black you could not see the outline of trees, and the smell of the forest so sweet I wanted to wrap it around my skin, I came to understand three things:
the incredible love and tenderness in the heart of the man forced to take such action; the incredible love and tenderness in the heart of the man saddened by his own action and; the incredible love and tenderness in my own heart that allowed me to keep loving him.
Tenderness in its myriad forms — family, church, and community — ensured our survival. Tenderness has contributed, in spite of the traumas of living, to the person that I am.
It is a tender summer day and I wonder: If every person, politicians especially, accessed a single memory of tenderness, would the world be a very different place? I, who thrive on seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, would like to think it so.
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Posted in Writing from the heart
Tagged Commentary, creative nonfiction, essay, inspiration, Life Stories, story telling, values and spirituality, world view