Fiona writes: "If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it." ~ Lucy Larcom
We have a small kindness to offer you, lovely people. Today my mystery novel about gardener Leonard & his dog Pickles, '
Small Kindnesses', is
free on kindle. You can also read this version on your PC or your phone. Download it now from
Amazon UK or
Amazon US, and do share the warmth and forward this email to your friends so they can do the same.
If you'd like to feel even warmer, do
read some stories of the small kindnesses people have received as a part of our
Blogsplash. It's not too late to
write your own piece about kindness. And I hope you feel as touched by Kaspa's story, below, as I was. Look after yourselves. Wishing many small kindnesses for you this week.
Kaspa writes: A small kindness - wake up!
Ten years ago. I was twenty-one. I had just finished my first semester at University and I was depressed. I was quiet, sullen, and I experienced the world as grey and flat. I hadn't learnt how to talk about my feelings, or about very much at all. I had become distrustful of real connections with others, and comfortable in the darkness.
I was home for Christmas. Christmas, when all the television adverts show people connecting, celebrating relationships, and trusting each other. Christmas when the seasonal films are over-saturated with colour, glossy holly-berry reds and rich greens, full of life. In contrast, my experience was drained of colour.
About a week before the big day, it snowed. In England the snow usually falls in the New Year and a white Christmas is rare, but it had snowed. There were a few inches on the ground. Enough for your feet to sink into, cracking the frosty thin crust and into the wet below.
Mum, Dad, brother, sister and me. We had gone walking in the Clent hills. We were not the only ones, the hills were full of families. Young children wrapped in layers of clothing waddling along, pulling plastic sledges behind them. A border collie dashing through the trees. On the path below, a line of horses churning the snow and earth together. The light was perfect, each thing standing out clearly. Beads of sweat on the horses' backs, the stop-motion movements of a robin, threads of white powder falling from the highest sun-lit branches of beech and oak. I was blind to all of these things, wrapped in a coarse blanket of knitted-together stories about myself and about the world.
Suddenly my brother is whooping and hollering and running towards me. Bam! We connect and I can see the snow covered ground rushing towards me. He's trying to wake me up and as I'm falling two doors open - through one of them is is life (and snowball fights and bright Christmas colours), and through the other is the same greyness. I slip into the wrong one, but I nearly smile and something, some love or something, breaks through and plants a seed.
So that's the small kindness I am remembering today, being pushed into the snow by my brother. I couldn't receive it at the time, or I didn't want to - the grey world seemed safer. Since then I have grown to appreciate the world in all its colour... and this year I am looking forward to the snow again.
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Photo by ahisgett via Creative Commons, with thanks.
