Three nights of rain.

Kenya writes at night.

There have been three nights of rain, and after the long, hot, smoky season, the change is astonishing. The first two nights were wild storms, with lightning and thunder, power outages, and a scared little white dog in our bed.

(“Can you put Wookie out?” I asked Chinua sometime in the wee hours of the morning. She’s not allowed to sleep in our room and normally sleeps with Solo and Isaac. “She’s scared,” he said, cuddling her. He clearly still hates her.)

This rain is early. Most seasons, we don’t get anything this consistent or strong until the middle or end of May. It feels like grace.

It only took one night of rain, and the beauty of the sky was returned to us. I feel the whole world shift inside of me. Beauty is here, and my eyes are full of it. The beauty of the wild world reminds me of other places I have seen, and I travel in my mind for a while. Redwood groves, rocky beaches, the driftwood-littered shores of islands in BC. The rich, dusty beauty of India. It is all still there, though I cannot visit now.

*

We started homeschool again last week. I use the term ‘we’ loosely. All five kids are doing school in one form or another. Kai’s is distance learning with his high school in Chiang Mai. Kenya is finishing up her year with the study group, where she boarded for a week out of every month. She has decided not to go back next year, but to return to homeschooling. Leafy is doing homeschool as always, and Solo and Isaac are as well. This is different for both of them since Solo usually attends a little homeschool co-op four afternoons a week, and Isaac a gentle-learning bilingual school in our town.

Perhaps, from the paragraph above, you can parse out a little of the complexity of these five kids doing five different things. There has been a lot of driving in the last years, as well as bus tickets and long-distance parenting, weekend visits, and long hauls when we drive to Chiang Mai (three hours away) for meetings or concerts. It has all been what we need to do to educate our kids in this life. We are thankful for the opportunities we have.

But it has felt gentle and quiet to have everyone at home with their various books and work. It has felt like a gift. A thorny gift, which has its pain. But nothing really is simple, is it? I fluctuate quite fluidly from wild hope and the joy of morning to the tired ache of another afternoon. I am patient until I’m not. But I do really see what a gift these days at home have been. I see them as short, it will not be this way forever. I want to go gently during this season.

*

There is a lot to be said for gentleness during a worldwide pandemic. I feel that we all crave it. I have found comfort in seeing the gentleness of people making masks for one another, singing, dropping food packages on doorsteps.

Jesus is a gentle king, who, when he was on earth, measured his words and spoke to the heart. He still speaks such kind words to me. I want to be like that! Maybe it is turning forty, or having a son who is turning eighteen, but I find myself revisiting the younger me and worrying over her choices. I sometimes wish I could do it again.

I am sorry for the ways I wasn’t gentle with myself or the people around me when I was younger. I would grow angry with myself for not being social, capable, patient enough with my children, or loving enough. Actually, I was overwhelmed and needed help. I couldn’t name it or be sad, so I would turn those feelings against myself, imagining that it was some flaw inside me that made me overwhelmed. I consistently blamed perceived flaws in myself for my sadness. And people weren’t always gentle with me.

But sometimes people were overwhelmingly tender toward me, with all my ideas and slightly skewed thinking. How many cups of tea has another soul handed me? How many times has someone said, “tell me more about that?” When things were hard, the tenderness of God came to me through kind people, and these moments were like islands that I rested on. They kept me from drowning.

So I also want to be gentle with myself then, that younger girl. I’m proud of the times that she found the strength to be kind to herself. She was a good, though flawed mother who loved her kids so, so much. And the abundant grace of God fills all those holes and will continue to fill them.

*

I muse about these things when I think about responding to the world in the shape of the Internet, or conversations with my children and their own slightly skewed thinking. I want to look at all of it with eyes of tenderness.

When I think of gentleness for ourselves and those around us, especially in a changing world, I think of the peas that are growing in my garden right now. They don’t actually know where they will end up. They send their curly shoots out and find the next space, and then the next. It looks like curiosity. It looks like being thankful for this day, this one day. And waiting to see what will come. It looks very free, very gentle.

I almost can’t write anything anymore without wanting to give all the caveats, because somewhere near there is a wail of grief for the suffering world, and there is anger, and you have permission (I have permission) to exist and feel those emotions, the full spectrum of all that loss and change brings.

But I also hope you can find something like gentleness with yourself, curiosity, and space for your need to grow, to be free.

***

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