[ding Dong, Ding Dong]

both off and on it looks adorable ღ

I bought a lovely locket brooch today at an antique shop!

Gatesville, North Carolina

circa 1840

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 to the person holding 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 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.”

- Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses" 

if we could all stop pretending we are whole, and instead embrace our constant becoming…

The remedy to despair… remember that our power is in our hope and action.

Art by Grace D. Chin