"The whole idea of gentleness runs contrary to the impulses of a culture that believes doing requires effort and misapprehends the world as a place of hostility — so it is worth a closer look. The word gentle comes from the Latin gentilis, which means 'belonging to the same family.' That brings to mind Thomas Berry's observation that the trees and grasses are our genetic cousins, our kin; and that the earth itself is born of the same star matter from which we are made. When we pick up a teapot gently, we embrace the kinship of the ordinary world. To see that subtle kinship around you, to see family, is to open your heart to your life; to be gentle with the world is to feel the kinship of it. In gentleness, the ordinary heart meets the ordinary world and they are found to beat as one.
"Gentleness has limited value as a mere idea — gentleness is a yielding love for 'what is' that involves your whole being: emotional, spiritual, intellectual and physical. To engage with the world that way, gently and wholly, is to return to the sort of unenclosed sensitivity that Henri and H. A. Frankfort described in our ancient forebears, who experienced the world 'as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship' — a precise description of the dialogue of Being. But that gentle wakefulness to the world, insofar as it involves reciprocity, also reminds us of the essential nature of gentleness: gentleness is not static by nature, nor is it found in any action per se; the quality of gentleness is only revealed in interaction — it is fundamentally a quality of relating, or relationship, in the same way that grace is. Because gentleness is grounded in the stillness of the present, it is a quality of relating that arises from wholeness and answers to wholeness. In its essence, gentleness is not a state — it is a subtle, two-way conversation, and does not exist independent of that conversation. If you gently move a baby's arm, that gentleness shows up in the sensitivity and care and patience and mindfulness of your interaction with the baby. A gentle gesture is a highly informed gesture: it begins in attentive unknowing and is guided by Being; like Being, it is in flux, adapting to and revealing the world's subtle currents. Whatever is gentle bespeaks a capacity for relationship. As such, it carries us out of the isolating wound of our self-consciousness and reunites our thinking with our Being.
"Because gentleness brings you into relationship with the world, it maximizes the world's reality for you. And the more reality the world has for you, the more it will activate you and engage you. Gentleness is not weakheartedness. It is about entering the full reality of mutual awareness. To move into gentleness is to step into a serene wakefulness that moves on and out, like ripples in a pond. Its patience is like a shot of oxygen to the loving logosmind, and it quickens your whole Being to the specificity of the present. Its fluid, welcoming spirit carries you forward, hand-in-hand with the world, fully activated. And that, more than anything, is what places gentleness on the side of life: because gentleness yields, it allows us to move forward in partnership with 'what is.' Whenever we lose gentleness, we put on the brakes and arrest our own life. Reality is sensational. Fantasy is sensationalistic."
