On Sunday mornings, I walk from my house to the Santa Cruz Quaker Meeting; it's about a mile. Quakers are known, officially, as "The Religious Society of Friends." At the end of the Meeting, I walk back home. Before I do walk back home, I always get myself a cup of coffee, which the Quaker Meeting kindly provides.
Yesterday, as I walked along, I encountered a couple of flags, and they put me in mind of another flag, from somewhere else (some pictures are below). Those flags tell a kind of story about our community, or so it seems to me.
As for the poem, by Danusha Laméris, formerly the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, someone had placed a copy of that poem on every seat in the Friends Meeting, before the Meeting began. Her poem stimulated quite a few lovely comments during that Friends Meeting yesterday.
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| A Flag From My Neighborhood |
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| A Flag From A Nearby Neighborhood |
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| A Flag From Somewhere Else |
Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
Image Credits:
(2) - (4) - Gary A. Patton, personal photos
(5) - https://danusha-lameris.mykajabi.com/
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