One day in a museum a companion described for me exquisite, soulful, miniature drawings by Daumier. She said there was a little dog, a dog made of curlicues. He was jumping in the wholly invisible wind. And I loved him, though I’d never see him. This is what Rainer Rilke understood as creaturely love, a tenderness.
Of tenderness there’s much to say. “Be tender with the world’s wounds” Rilke says.
Robert Bly:
“I am proud only of those days that pass in
undivided tenderness.”
I love the link between prideful satisfaction and tenderness.
The crucial word in Bly’s lines—“only:—-
We can assess our tenderness success.
My neighbor built an ugly fence behind my house. I don’t like him. Ans so I am a tenderness failure on the days where I talk unkindly under my breath.
It is harder and harder to achieve tenderness let alone sustain it.
Oh my tenderness we’ve been through so much. The discrimination in employment. The ableism and all the accrued distresses of a painful childhood. I walk about the streets knowing that the strangers who pass me by have suffered the same or even worse.
Oh tenderness, you’ve kept me alive. Don’t forsake me now.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
