The Act of Being Kind

There’s a certain stillness that comes when you know you’ve made another being feel safe. I feel it sometimes—with Wallie, with my husband, with the strays on the streets of brutal Bali. This act of kindness doesn't seem grand. Often just a moment. But it touches the heart, and stays.

It has been a swift seven months since we moved to Bali, and at times, I still drown in grief.

I’ve spent most part of these months, especially lately, trying to figure out what the grief means. Not the big abstract grief—the world’s grief, though that too—but the quieter kind. The kind that sits in your chest and doesn’t speak until 3 a.m., when you’re too tired to make sense of it and too awake to ignore it (damn the sleep deprivation.)

I arrived on this island hoping maybe I could write my way to peace. But the days here are loud, and the roads are dense. The beauty is brutal. The suffering is everywhere—dogs limping through trash piles, people walking bare feet on a scorching bitumen. And me, trying to find poetry in it.

And now, I don’t pray for it to stop anymore. I pray to see clearly. To let it carve something honest in me. Maybe that’s the whole point—to watch the dust and not mistake it for the road. To know I’m not the pain, just the one watching it.

Somewhere in all this—grief, writing, silence—I remember who I am. I remember the light. That’s the part that saves me. That I still believe in the return.

That I still believe I’m already on my way Home

At least, there's a meaning in these harsh, suffering scenes I see every day.

Let me remember:

The grief is not mine to hold.

I am not here to carry the world,

only to walk it in truth,

to witness with loving kindness, and to be grateful.

and then to release it back into the wind.

This is an act of being kind– to myself, who also needs it, but often left forgotten.