"For two weeks now I have been housebound, unable to venture away from the little gray-shingled cottage I call home. I sit writing on the gray velvet couch or venture to the wicker chair on the porch. I hate my confinement, but as confinements go, it is idyllic. I have a blush-pink rosebush in radiant bloom. My garden borders the horticultural splendor of my neighbor's garden, a magnet for butterflies, hummingbirds, and cats.

"I hate being sick, I'm 'never' sick — and being temporarily incapacitated fills me with rage, self-pity, and wonder at the great courage so many people display in far more challenging situations. I am not in a back cast. I do not have AIDS.

"For the second time in my life, I have found myself sensitive to electricity. It seems somehow connected to 'bringing in' a large piece of work, especially music. When I am in fluorescent light, my body prickles, I grow dizzy and lightheaded, my joints ache, and I feel nauseated. I need to get out of it — and fast. Computers have a similar effect. Refrigerators are like flu. A regular electric light can cause my hands to tingle. I've been living by candlelight, searching for ways to ground this unpleasant and frightening response. I've read books on environmental illness, spoken to psychiatrists, psychologists, internists, medical intuitives. In one form or another, all agree that my vibration is too high and needs to be stepped down by any number of known means: diet, drugs, sound, physical exercise, spiritual practice. All of these modalities work. One or some of them will lessen my sensitivity sooner or later. My fear, of course, is that they won't, that my sensitivity will continue to spiral higher so that I end up like an ash or the mummy, something out of a science fiction movie, which is how the sensitivity can make me feel.

" 'Julia,' I tell myself, 'people lived by candlelight for centuries. Lighten up. Slow down. Surrender.' Fat chance.

"And so I sit with my lovely garden view, my two small dogs, and my craving to escape all this coziness, get in the car, and drive, drive to wide-open spaces and a less claustrophobic life. I am learning something, I suppose. It is the usual 'lesson' of my own passionate, restless nature, a lesson I know by heart.

"My near neighbor has an ailing heart. She is wraith-thin, pale, with large, frightened eyes. Two weeks from now she is scheduled for surgery, a prospect she faces by turning deeper and deeper into her Buddhist practice. Still, I can see her fear. She is so gentle, so fiercely alive, so kind. Kindness is what I am finding all around me through this illness. It is not what I expected. And yet, my gardening neighbor passes me the name of a yoga teacher and tells me she once passed through an anxious time that the teacher helped her to gently ground. I call the teacher, touched by the unexpected kindness and wondering at my own cynicism that kindness is unexpected.

"At all times, in all places, good is present and active. In the midst of terror and suffering, goodness is still stubbornly afoot. People will be kind as surely as people will be cruel. We forget this. We are taught by our media to forget this, and when we remember it, our hearts ease. Kindness is possible everywhere.

"For many of us, the great enemy of our kind impulses is our sense of time. We feel too harried and too hurried to take the extra little beat necessary to extend ourselves. And so, we notice the deli clerk's new hairstyle but don't take the second to remark on its appeal. We see the young mother struggling with a stroller, groceries, and a door, but we leave her to her business. We are busy with our own.

EXERCISE

"We speak of 'the milk of human kindness' and 'honey from the rock.' Sometimes a little sweetness can go a long way toward improving our spiritual condition. Take pen in hand and list five things you could do to be kind to yourself and five things you could do to be kind to others. Remember to be specific and accurate about what does feel good, not what should feel good.

"1. Get new shoelaces.

"2. Buy a better hairbrush.

"3. Get pretty stamps.

"4. Buy the album you've been wanting.

"5. Put lemon in your water and drink a lot more of it.

"1. Send your sister racy red socks.

"2. Send your daughter movie money.

"3. Call your old teacher and inquire about her health.

"4. Make homemade soup for a friend.

"5. Send the Harry Potter books to your friend with the blues.

"Now take one action from each of these categories. Be kind to you and to someone else."