I’ve just read an extremely moving and human story of a little boy who was abandoned by his mother and badly abused by his father. In all of this he befriended an 86 year old woman who saw how wounded and broken he was. She noticed the slowness of his walk and the way he always looked down with his hands tightly buried in his pockets. She desperately wanted to change this in him, so in her wisdom she decided to buy him a gift, a kite with a ball of string.
It wasn’t long and there he was, running in the field looking up, with his fingers tugging at the string and the kite diving and climbing in the sky. A simple act of kindness and loving insight, and as the story goes, this little act became the very seed of a major change and healing in his life.
Imagine the compassion, the beauty and practicality in a heart, that is able to look at a little boy who always looks down, and decide that he needs a kite. I think we’ve all needed someone like this at some stage in our lives.
What a perfect gift to add some inspiration to his life.
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Isn’t it. Such marvellous insight.
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Beautiful. A simple thing like this can be better than years of therapy.
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I agree Monika. To be able to think and feel like that is such a gift.
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Compassion – there is no sweeter gift.
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So true.
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What a lovely story about someone looking beyond what they saw…
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Thanks Theresa. You’re right. What a gift to be able to see like that.
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Why wait until *we* are 86? She had probably been gifting these acts most of her life.
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I believe that to be true, Eric. What a way to live.
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Wonderful, touching…inspiring post, Don. I agree with Eric; my guess is that this was neither a first nor an isolated act of kindness by this woman. This kind of goodness and protectiveness of children is heart-deep.
I’d also like to think that she also called social services against the father…or better yet, organized a group of her older lady friends and stalked the father late one night and beat the pudding out of him.
But that’s just me…
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Lol – thanks for your honesty Marylin. Yes, one wonders about the immense goodness that can be infused in to human life by someone like that over a life time. Simple yet so profound and effective.
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The best of humanity and the worst in that little story. If only it was that simple, buying a kite
for all the lost hurting damaged little folk out there.
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Thanks Katy. If only, but I suppose it’s a start together with all the other millions of little acts of empathy and kindness, which in the end create an impact invisible to us.
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When the Irish poet Seamus Heaney died this year, this poem was posted on a fellow bloggers site, though can’t seem to find it.
A Kite for Michael and Christopher…..here’s another link I did find
http://harborsofheaven.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/two-poems-by-seamus-heaney-1939-2013/
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Beautiful poem Hudson. Thank you.
” the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens”
Now how’s that for a bit of poetic genius. Brilliant – thanks again Hudson.
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