First published in the September—December 2022 edition of the Portobello Buddhist Priory Newsletter.

A few days ago a friend and I were sitting on a park bench in a little park above the River Clyde near New Lanark. We’d walked part of the way along a most beautiful wooded path threading its way up and down above the river and stopped to eat our sandwich.

On the walk he’d talked of difficulties in his life: relationship problems; a potentially intractable medical condition; deep loneliness.

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As we sat, I found myself telling him about another friend who’d died recently. I’d gone to his wake the night before his funeral; I wanted to give a tribute to my dead friend, and told the many people there of his kindness to me at a time of deep personal anguish because of something to do with one of my children.

My friend who’d died had been sent off to boarding school aged 7, and he’d carried into his adult life a sense that groups of men could represent danger.

He’d clearly also learned at boarding school that showing emotion was not advisable, and both his body and face had a curious quality as if frozen. As I got to know him, I’d discovered he was uncoordinated and couldn’t, for example, catch a ball. Conversation with him in the small men’s group to which we both belonged was rather difficult: he was guarded, and this together with his lack of facial expression and what would be known as body-language somehow made empathic conversation difficult.

But one day, walking with him in the country and telling him of the emotional difficulties I was experiencing, I powerfully felt a deep, raw kindness from him. His frozen, ‘locked in’ exterior seemed to melt away; and the intrinsic generosity of his heart was so evident and sincere that I felt held by it and was deeply comforted.

I tried to explain this to the other mourners, and why I wanted to read out Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem ‘Kindness’ as a tribute to him. As I started to read the poem, vivid recollections of his deep kindness began to come back to me, and the poignant, heart-breaking contrast between his open and so-generous heart and his otherwise clumsy, frozen stiffness; and I found myself overcome.

Perhaps half a dozen times, I had to stop and try to regain control of my emotions. Eventually, I reached the end of the poem, and stood, looking down at the floor, silently acknowledging to myself my embarrassment at having shown such emotion, especially in front of a large group of strangers.

As I walked through the crowd to the back of the hall, not meeting anybody’s eye, a man took my arm, and thanked me for the tribute. I said I was sorry to have become so emotional, and he replied – ‘But that was the tribute. It came from your heart.’ I was struck by the dissonance between my embarrassment, even shame (this is Scotland, after all) and how the tribute had touched him. Two strangers, hearts speaking to hearts.

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As I told this story to my companion on the park bench, I found myself becoming emotional again. He could see the tears in my eyes; hear the catch in my voice. He asked gently if I knew the poem. Not from memory, I replied, but I have it on my phone.

I passed it to him, and asked him if he would like to read it out. He did so, slowly. We discussed some of the lines: ‘the tender gravity of kindness’; how ‘before knowing kindness as the deepest thing inside you, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing’.¹

 We fell into silence, gazing out over the rose garden in front of us to where the trees steeply sloped down to the Clyde, eyes lifting to the fields in the distance beyond the river; and the far away hills, indistinct in their haziness.

Suddenly, startlingly, I heard a deep sob beside me. I turned and saw my friend was crying. It was as if a hard knot of grief or loneliness or sorrow had become dislodged in him, releasing the emotion behind it.

We sat side by side without speaking, two old men in their 70s, tearful on a park bench; two threads uniting in ‘the cloth of all sorrows’ and letting what had arisen pass through into a place of peace and tender kindness.

Later, still in companionable silence, we walked through the rose garden in the park. I found myself transfixed by the beauty of these flowers, these roses.  Deep red, glistening with drops of dew or rain. A perfume, bitter-sweet. Perfection. Utter perfection. We stood for some minutes, enrapt, before walking on.

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On the path, fragments of words from Dōgen came to mind which I later looked up:

To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.²

Whether mistakenly or not, I had the sense that in the curiously cleansed state after letting the wash of emotion pass through me, those roses had ‘come forth’ in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Their vivid presence and perfection seemed to enter an empty space cleared by a letting go, a letting arise and fall away with nothing added, except perhaps for both of us a tacit acknowledgement that for what we had shared, no words were needed.

Notes

1. Shihab Nye, Naomi, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Eighth Mountain Press, 1994.
2. Tanahashi, Kazuaki, ed. Enlightenment Unfolds. Shambala, 1999, p 55.