How long is long enough to understand one another?
Sacrifice, sometimes, is only truly understood when it is silent.
This piece belongs to a series of 100 posts written in memory of Thom's grandmother, published on her Facebook.
The longer I spent beside the mother cat at my grandmother’s house, the more I realised that until we have lived alongside someone long enough, we cannot see the “quiet” kinds of beauty that have no language. The moment I saw that beauty was when the kittens left one by one, and after the last of them the mother cat’s belly went on filling with milk all by itself — swollen, hard and sore for days on end.
Sacrifice, sometimes, is only truly understood when it is silent.
It brought to mind the wonderful opening passage of The Man Who Planted Trees.
“To see the greatness of a person’s character, you must have the chance to watch how they act over many years. If that person acts selflessly and nobly, and brings about a clear and considerable good without asking for anything in return, such a person is hard to forget.”
From The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono.
Remember this — revisit it in a few days.
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