The Important of Kindness and Hush
Excerpt from Fine Line: Mental Health/Mental Illness, Michael Nye's portraits of the people experiencing mental illness and homelessness in San Antonio:
My favorite place to be is a place that I'm most safe. It's a corner in my kitchen and I've got it fixed up to look like a tree house. On my left is a window with plants everywhere and everything a person would want—books, music—that's in my safe place.
I spend three-quarters of my waking life in that safe place.
How is it possible to love someone that beats you up, that uses you, that degrades you? I don't understand why a parent would grab a child's hair and twist it around and slam that child into a wall. How a father's who's going through a drought of loneliness takes one of his children and strip that child of dignity and knowledge and give that child pain. Why would a parent deprive him of food, lock them in a cabinet—why would that happen?
I'd like to wrap my arms around someone--whether my age or older, younger—wrap my arms around someone that is going through this until they finally believe it's not their fault, they're a beautiful person.
Kindness is more important than anything else in this world. I think that every philosopher has probably tried to tell us that. That's what it comes down to. What else are we here for, but to take care of each other? To nurture the planet. What else are we here for?
There's a thing when we're children we experience. It usually exists in libraries and it's called the hush. Like this magic world called Hush. There's not many places now to find hush. Sometimes I really do think if every person would experience hush—even if they almost have to force it on themselves for a while—just the bird, just the wind, nothing else, hush—there would be less violence.
See also:
- "Regarding the Pain of Others," To the Best of Our Knowledge, April 20, 2014
- Posts on pausing, silence, kindness, and soothing difficult emotions